Eternity

Johnny Xie

Eternity, 31.5 x 23.6 inches, Oil on Canvas, 2024

This painting presents a skull entwined with delicate flowers, set against dark green-hued, Vanitas-esque surroundings. Through expressive brushstrokes, he crafts a mysterious, thought-provoking atmosphere, subtly delving into the timeless theme of life and death through the contrast between mortality and blooming nature.

Artist Statement

Johnny Xie

Johnny was born in Shanghai, went to boarding school in the UK, and is now a freshman at the University of Southern California.

Growing up in multiple, completely different environments has shaped the way I understand art. Having a religious family, alongside attending chapel almost every day in boarding school, meant that I naturally developed a genuine fascination with both Eastern and Western expressions of belief. Rather than aligning myself with a single system of faith, I became captivated by how religions mediate ideas visually and serve their unique purpose in our society.

This curiosity about how systems of cognition and perception juggle subjectivity and objectivity led me to experiment with visual contradictions in my work. Flawed vision has been the fundamental principle of my paintings, where I love to hide colours that should never exist in my subjects. I often take familiar imagery and disrupt it through unexpected colours, proportions, or deliberately inaccurate details. These“mistakes” have their own purpose: they challenge the viewer to reconsider what we assume to be true, just because our whole life we have been taught to see it that way.

I am drawn to the moments where devotion becomes commercialised, or emptied of meaning, and I use my practice to examine how individuals navigate that conflict. Alongside this focus, I also work across painting, charcoal, and art installation. All these medium serves as a way for me to portray a different kind of emotion. However, my shift across media is driven not solely by emotional variation but also by the conceptual aspect of my ideas: different materials expose different forms of sensorial perception, partial reflections of subjective truths, even about the same objects. Painting allows me to play with Impressionism, Expressionism, and Fauvism, charcoal lets me explore the world in only shadows and traces, and installation allows me to build a physical environment that interacts and makes viewers question their own position in a certain space.

Ultimately, I aim to create art that unsettles my audience rather than take a stance since I understand the importance of context shaping one's understanding. My practice is driven by the belief that flawed observation is not a weakness but a catalyst-it opens space for reinterpretation and potential for cultural dialogue.